How on-demand driver companies like Zuver are catching up to Uber, Ola

Even as Uber and Ola have made owning a car an almost non-necessity, a marketplace solely for on demand driver services is slowly catching onSupraja Srinivasan | ET Bureau | Updated: September 28, 2016, 09:31 IST

Even as Uber and Ola have made owning a car an almost non-necessity, a marketplace solely for on demand driver services is slowly catching on.

Zuver, a driver aggregator platform, which operates in Mumbai, Pune and Bengaluru is based on a B2C model where customers can request for drivers for their own cars on an hourly basis.

Zuver follows a 'Pay-Per-Use' model where customers are charged for the first hour and then per minute thereafter, thus saving cash burn for customers.

But with customers opting to give their own cars a miss in favour of hailing an Ola or Uber, how does Zuver ensure its survival, and a healthy one at that?

Sidhanth Mally, cofounder of the firm said, the use cases for both the models are very different and one doesn't affect the other.

"We are ahead of an Ola/Uber because of the crucial factors of comfort of one's own car and the flexibility to make multiple stops. When you make multiple stops or when the duration of a journey crosses an hour, there is no question of an Uber being cheaper," said Mally.

Zuver's confidence is echoed by UrbanClap which also offers Driver-on-Demand as one of the many services on its multi-service platform.

Varun Khaitan, cofounder of UrbanClap, said the platform has only increased in traction since it was launched last year. "The platform is one of the smaller categories for UrbanClap, but is still a successful one," said Khaitan. The platform offers daily local as well as outstation driver services but has hived off the service of monthly driver availability owing to low traction, a service that was available on the platform earlier.

Khaitan maintains that competition from cab aggregators has nothing to do with UrbanClap's decision to hive off the monthly driver hire services. Mally said drivers too are shifting from the aggregator plat forms of Ola/Uber to driver-on-demand platforms on the back of a better value proposition and significantly higher revenue stream.

The five-month-old company claims to have garnered 5,000 transactions per month across the 3 cities it operates in. Rohan Thakkar, joint MD at Hermes Group, one of the investors in Zuver, said investors' bullishness in the space is due to the fact that having a driver has become a necessity rather than a luxury in today's market.

But the exuberance is not the same across the board. Online home services marketplace Timesaverz has had to discontinue its Driver-on-Demand service a few months after its launch due to lack of demand and low revenue traction.